This Lively Copperfield Is Rich With Dickensian Touches

It is worth watching the new, nearly 3-hour Masterpiece Theatre production of David Copperfield for the names alone.

Need a wicked stepfather and his dour sister? Edward and Jane Murdstone. The surname dares you not to scowl as you say it.

A woman who revels in proclaiming her misery? Mrs. Gummidge.

A sniveling, slimy, falsely "'umble" clerk? Uriah Heep.

They hit you, each one -- even if you already know them well from the book -- like perfect little pearls, tags that manage to turn truly unpleasant people into givers of perverse delight.

The names are, of course, the invention of Charles Dickens, so you can't really credit this first-rate new, predominantly British production for them. But the two-night movie (tonight and Monday on PBS), co-produced by Boston's WGBH, deserves banks of credit for being so deliciously faithful, full of all the tragedy, comedy, sorrow and joy of this great, wide-armed novel.

There is little in this production that isn't in Dickens and little of Dickens that isn't in this production, and the result is exquisite viewing not just for old English majors but for their PokM-imon-addled children, as well.

Copperfield is the semi-autobiographical epic about which Dickens proclaimed, in an introduction to a reprinting, "Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child. And his name is `David Copperfield.'"

The comically verbose and perpetually broke Mr. Micawber was modeled on Dickens' own father. And the title character shares much of Dickens' own story.

Over more than 800 easily turnable pages, the novel follows David from birth to manhood, a journey that also tours much of the human condition. It is especially strong at illuminating mid-19th century social injustice, much of which still exists in much of the world: debtor's prisons, child labor, the powerlessness of women.

But for all the darkness it explores, it retains an essential jaunty air. Despite being on the receiving end of serial cruelties, especially at the hands of the siblings Murdstone, Copperfield clings to optimism. Without being 10 or more hours long, the movie can't get it all in, of course. But screenwriter Adrian Hodges, director Simon Curtis and producer Kate Harwood have used scalpels rather than broadswords, keeping the novel's feeling of richness intact. Especially keen is their incorporation of Dickens' dialogue, his extraordinary talent for making characters talk like themselves and only themselves.

"Too much clutter and frippery" in the living room, Murdstone tells David's sweet, weak mother as he begins to take over her life.

"Bah, stuff and humbug," David's Aunt Betsey Trotwood tells the Murdstones in finally wresting care of him from them.

Or Barkis the cart driver delivering his famously terse proposal of marriage to Clara Peggotty: "Barkis is willin'."

Aunt Betsey is played in all her imperiousness, rectitude and virulent distaste for donkeys on her lawn by Maggie Smith. The other major names, Bob Hoskins and Ian McKellen, are similarly resonant as Micawber and the cruel schoolteacher Creakle, respectively.

David himself is the character in whose orbit others revolve but who primarily reacts to the light and shadows they create. Daniel Radcliffe as young David impresses with his ability to communicate calm and a sense of the future amid the turmoil of his life, but Ciaran McMenamin as the older David remains a little bland.

It is Nicholas Lyndhurst, apparently a TV star of some magnitude in Britain, who nearly steals the production. With a shock of red hair and a stooped, nearly meatless frame, he is in whiny word and cringing manner thoroughly, exuberantly Heep, everything Dickens could have dreamed for the character.

Playing in mid-April and on PBS, David Copperfield is not officially a sweeps event. But it is certainly the equal and most probably the better of any of the two-night movies that will arrive in May insisting, with far more ardor, on your attention.